


Bodies of Dust

by motorghost



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Daemon Settling, Daemons, Dark Materials AU, First Meetings, Flirting, High Adventure, Intrigue, Light Angst, M/M, Mission Fic, Pining, Post-Recall, Redemption, Shimada Brothers, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:34:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23297092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/motorghost/pseuds/motorghost
Summary: Nothing is safe from change, but Hanzo never thought that extended to his daemon. Now his long-lost brother, once thought dead, might be offering him and his soul a path to redemption.
Relationships: Jesse McCree/Hanzo Shimada
Comments: 23
Kudos: 171





	Bodies of Dust

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Dark Materials AU that was prompted to me by wonderful person and talented artist [@YourAverageJoke](https://twitter.com/YourAverageJoke) and voted on!
> 
> I used a merger of the Overwatch world and the HDM world, but mostly used HDM tings: technology, geography (that's why it claims McCree is from Texas,) and most everything else. There are omnics and Overwatch, of course. I tried to merge them as seamlessly as possible.
> 
> I struggled with this one, but I'm very happy with the way it turned out in the end.

Hanzo wears the only thing left of his ancestral home: a dark blue kimono. Embossed dragons slink silvery over his shoulder and upper back like guardian angels. Over his many years of isolated travel, he has parted with belonging after belonging, feeling and necessity gradually whittling away all tangible connection to the clan he once expected to rule. But this kimono is too fine to abandon, and there are still occasions in his life that call for impressive dress. This is one of them. He is going to meet the only other man in the world who would recognize the origins of this kimono. A man whom, up until four weeks ago, Hanzo assumed ten years’ dead.

This township probably hasn’t seen its like, nor anyone like Hanzo, for many years. Though still a busy Mediterranean seaport, it no longer draws the international crowd it once did. Ever since Overwatch was shut down, pirates and smugglers moved into the gap and the local community could do little to stop them. All the more reason for Hanzo to feel self-conscious.

Hatsue feels the same, and she is similarly radiant; the midday sun makes each of her black scales a gleaming gem. Over five feet long, she drapes over Hanzo’s shoulders along with his scarf, twisted up in the fabric. Her head hovers low over his shoulder, except when she flicks her tongue and checks Hanzo’s flank.

She is right to be watchful; they have been followed ever since they left the aërodock. 

And their pursuer is clever. Hanzo has not managed to lose nor trap them even after several blocks. But he is determined to do so before they reach their destination; Genji was adamant about secrecy. And the last thing Hanzo needs right now is yet another assassin.

“Relax,” Hatsue whispers in his ear. “You will make a mistake if you are this tense.”

He can just make out her eyes from his angle; she seems worried for him, and she is not given to displays of concern.

“I am looking,” Hanzo mutters, hardly moving his lips, “For an exit.”

“The next alleyway is crowded. Fish-mongers. Try that.”

Hanzo nods, trusting her implicitly. He keeps his stride even as they approach the side street. Eyes forward. Almost passing it by.

Then he takes a ninety-degree turn and starts walking faster. Hatsue hisses and most people jump out of their way. Several hardly move and Hanzo has to shove them, causing general outcry, but it’s no matter—Hatsue is scanning behind them to identify the follower while Hanzo searches for an out.

But the crowd is growing rowdy. People like this aren’t keen to tolerate a rude foreigner, no matter how splendidly dressed. The alley is growing impassable.

So he chooses up; Hanzo leaps, grabs the railing of a fire escape, and scales the building as quickly as he walked. Hatsue stays coiled tight around his shoulders, still looking for their pursuer as Hanzo breaks into a run across the roof. He is already nocking an arrow in his bow.

Then, a shrieking cry, a dark bolt past the end of Hanzo’s nose, and his dragon-clawed prosthetics skid to a halt. Both Hanzo and Hatsue rear with fangs and arrows drawn, but their attacker lands on the far edge of the roof, right in the middle of their escape route. Or, one of their attackers, at least.

It’s a hawk: russet-brown with a white belly and wrathful yellow eyes. It looks at Hanzo and Hatsue with all the sharpness of raptorial intent: _move, and my strike will not miss._

He can feel Hatsue’s dread, the ancient blood-dread of a serpent confronted with a bird of prey, and she lets out a low, resonant hiss, spreading her hood, brandishing her fangs. _I don’t miss, either._

“If you’d wait just one goddamn minute,” the hawk spits, harsh and heavily accented and long-drained of patience, “No one’s tryin’a hurt you.”

“Who are you?” Hanzo barks. “What do you want?”

“There he is. Jesus H.”

Hanzo turns his head at the sound of a new voice and scraping brick, trusting that Hatsue won’t take her eyes off the hawk.

A glove, leather and worn, grabs the edge of the roof and pulls up a similarly worn man. His hat and coat call to mind the gunslingers of western Texas and, when his legs follow, the chaps and boots confirm it. Hanzo’s eyes cut at the large six-shooter at his hip and the flash grenades dangling from the other side. The man climbs far slower than Hanzo, but still fast enough to be impressive for someone wearing flat soles and stiff leathers.

Still huffing and puffing enough for Hanzo to wrinkle his lip.

“Wasn’t tryin’a hassle you, there,” the man drawls, his accent as thick as his daemon’s.

“Then what do you want?” Though Hanzo’s bow is lowered, he could still send an arrow through the man’s throat faster than he could draw breath. “Speak quickly!”

“Escort,” the man coughs, patting his chest. “You made me toss a perfectly good cigar.”

_“Escort?”_

“For you,” the man tosses a gloved hand towards Hanzo. “‘Sposed to take you to the hide-out.”

“What hide-out?”

“Genji told you to meet him in the Cerveja Tavern, right?”

Hanzo’s fingers tighten on his arrow. “How do you know that name?”

“We ain’t meetin’ in Cerveja. The message was just to get you into the city. Letter could’ve been intercepted somehow. The real meet-up is there.”

The cowboy points beyond Hanzo and Hanzo turns. The only perceivable location, the most prominent within miles, is the glass dome of Overwatch: the once-Magisterium-sanctioned arm of justice against the omnic uprising and its many subsequent conflicts.

Hanzo looks back at the man. “You’re kidding.”

“Last place anyone would look, right?”

“Then you also worked for Overwatch.”

“Most of my life. But, I’m gettin’ ahead of myself.” He removes his hat and gives what Hanzo estimates to be a genuine show of respect. “You’re Shimada Hanzo, I’m Jesse McCree,” he nods towards his hawk, “That there’s Nisparilla, and you,” the cowboy flutters his hat towards Hatsue, “Must be the one I heard so much about.”

Hatsue hisses so ungraciously, even to a potential enemy, that Hanzo shushes her under his breath.

But McCree only laughs. “S’alright. I’d be pissed off, too, if I used to be a dragon.”

Hatsue makes a sound like a growling python while Hanzo flares; this stranger knows far too much.

McCree pushes back his hair and the sun breaks orange from behind a cloud, makes a golden halo on his head, puts honey into squinted eyes—not as angry as the hawk’s, but the potential is there. Despite the unkemptness of his beard, his jaw is broad and mouth full, and Hanzo might be tempted to call him handsome if he were under any other circumstances. 

But those good looks only amplify the man’s aura of danger.

“Pleasure to meet you both.” A beat, then McCree gestures with his hat as he adds, “Where’s the other one?”

Then Tsuji slithers out from under Hanzo’s scarf, his head kept close to the body he shares with his sister.

__|¯|__

“Can I see them?”

That Genji asks with his mask off is the only reason Hanzo obeys. He can’t remember much from the fight—at the time, he was a mind apart, focused only on combat and the dominant mantra of his life: _you must, you must_ —but looking at the individual scars on Genji’s almost-forty-year-old face is enough to put Hanzo in the most conciliatory of moods. 

Hatsue and Tsuji, curled into a tight circle under the slip of Hanzo’s scarf, close to making Hanzo feel claustrophobic, barely move their heads when Hanzo tugs back the silk. They both refuse to look at Genji. At least Hatsue nods; her version of a polite bow.

“And it happened…?”

Hanzo stares at Genji. This, apparently, is the limit of his concessions; he cannot get his mouth to open.

Genji settles back into his chair. “When did they split?”

With a cough, Hanzo manages. “The day after.”

Genji slowly nods.

The air is so heavy around them, Hanzo feels crushed beneath it. Why did they have to meet in Overwatch’s emptied medical bay? All of the tools and contraptions only remind him of the torture Genji must’ve went through. The torture Hanzo put him through.

“And… snakes,” Genji says, “When did that happen?”

“Sometime after I left.” Hanzo looks down as the twins slither down his arm, Tsuji reluctant to move but surrendering to his sister’s will. “Neither would settle. Hatsue was a wolf for awhile.” Hanzo momentarily grinds his teeth at the memory of her endless, mournful howling. “Tsuji, a carp. I kept him in a small bowl for a month.” Tsuji seems to sigh. “Then, one morning, I found them like this.”

“Ah. And, the new names?”

“The old ones were hardly fitting,” Hanzo sighed. “And she— _they_ wanted to change them.”

“Eldest sister,” Hatsue hisses, “And little brother. It is tradition.”

“Of course,” Genji says, soft and low. Deferent in a way that surprises Hanzo. “Well. Aoi changed many times during my surgeries”

Hanzo eyes the small, mottled black cat in the corner. Aoi displays a large patch of steel over the right side of her face, her right foreleg, and both ears, which swivel with mechanical precision. Her green eyes are focused on Hanzo, but her tail whips to and fro, belying the inner agitation she was so well-known for as a dragon; still lacking the poise of her ancestors. Hanzo used to half-expect her to transform into something else, like most of their Shimada relatives. There was no shame in it; their mother’s daemon was a white heron. Only heirs and those closest to the _oyabun_ seat carried the privilege of having a dragon for a daemon. And all traitors lost that privilege upon the break of their loyalty.

A fate worse than death.

That Genji’s daemon only shifted after Hanzo nearly killed him gnaws at Hanzo. And if the look on Genji’s face is any indication, he’s thinking about it, too. 

“She seems happy,” Genji adds, looking back at Aoi. “When she landed on this form, so well-suited to what Overwatch asked of me… I did not know it at the time, but it was meant to happen.” He looks at Hanzo, some lightness returning to his eyes. “When I first came to Nepal, she became so lazy. You have no idea.”

“It was comfortable,” Aoi mutters petulantly.

Hanzo swallows his disappointment in Genji’s dragon transforming into a cat—a smallish house cat, at that—and instead reminds himself that his own daemon’s situation is far, far worse.

“What do you want, Genji? Your letter said nothing.”

“I would have thought that calling you to this peninsula, of all places, would have told you enough.”

Hanzo snorts. “I had hoped you were merely sentimental.”

“Not sentimental—hopeful.”

“If there is any practical difference, I fail to see it.”

“Overwatch is reforming.” Genji raises his hand when Hanzo opens his mouth, “I would not ask you to join us. Not yet, anyway. There is something else that I must ask. Something that only you can do.”

As Genji talks, Hanzo listens, but a part of him is floating above them both. Watching it all like a bemused spirit, a scoffing wonder that gradually boils to irritation. That only one month ago, Genji interrupted Hanzo’s yearly ritual to honor him in the very shrine of their ancestral home, boggles the mind. They fought, Hanzo unleashed Hatsue and Tsuji’s powers, but they were turned against him and he fell. That Genji spared his life—why? To accost Hanzo with ideas of purpose? The old Genji’s only idea of purpose was to spend as much money and abuse his body and soul in as many ways as he could. Hanzo used to genuinely wonder if he cared about his life at all, so directionless it seemed.

Now Hanzo is sitting in the medical bay of the very organization that restored Genji after Hanzo ruined him, and Genji is tasking Hanzo with a complicated mission while offering little more than platitudes about a better world. Now he seems so full of purpose it’s absurd; as transformed in body and mind as his once-great daemon.

It must be some kind of game. The fool was angry enough to attack Hanzo at Hanamura, to prove his cyborg strength before giving Hanzo his life back. Does Genji think his elder brother owes him something?

_Don’t you?_

Hanzo glances at Hatsue. She is looking at Genji, ostensibly listening to the details as Hanzo was, but when she glances back at Hanzo, he knows it was not her whose voice he heard in his head.

Tsuji is, hauntingly, already staring at Hanzo.

“Hanzo?” Genji’s robotic tones are hatefully caring. “Are you alright?”

Hanzo huffs, looking back at Genji. To his own surprise and devastation, the broken heart Hanzo has carried for ten years has healed not one iota at seeing Genji alive. He only feels confusion, and with that, rage.

_What was it all for?_

He tempers his voice, betraying no feeling. “This is not a simple task, Genji.”

“I know. But I believe you are the best man for the job. And I also believe,” he nods towards Hanzo’s twin daemons, “It may bring you some of the answers you seek.”

Something splits inside of Hanzo like cracking clay—the same fracture that split open right after they pushed Genji’s body off the edge of Hanamura’s highest cliff. Adrenaline graduating into unimaginable pain. Barring everyone from his room, trying to soothe his dragon, trying to reason with her well into the morning. Then, her split, and pain draining like an opened blister, filling instead with a hollowness unknown to him before. Three ghosts wandering through their duties until the day Hanzo finds he cannot go on any longer.

If fulfilling this task for Genji would give him a chance at putting things back to the way they used to be, even a little bit, then he must take it.

“When shall I leave?”

Genji smiles. “When your partner is ready.”

“My _what?”_

__|¯|__

Half a dozen strangers, all ex-Overwatch agents, swim before Hanzo in such an array of variety and rapidity that he dissociates a little. First a genetically-modified gorilla with, bizarrely, a black ant for a daemon, shakes his hand, says something maudlin about Overwatch’s code of conduct. Hanzo listens with highly trained neutrality; if they truly wish him to accomplish this mission, he will follow no one’s code but his own. Certainly not that of an animal with yet another animal for a daemon.

Even more offensive is Zenyatta, Genji’s so-called mentor: an omnic with a mechanical tortoise sitting in his hovering lap. Hanzo assumes he had it made as his own daemon—many omnics have had similar procedures—but the farce is too much for him to take.

He turns instead to the doctor: a blonde woman with a spider monkey by her side. She quickly scans him with a technology Hanzo can’t even identify before cooly wishing him a pleasant voyage. The monkey huffs with thinly-veiled animosity, but neither Hatsue nor Tsuji seems keen on retaliation. They drape upon Hanzo’s shoulders with quiet determination, eager to leave.

The rest are more amiable. A giant of a man with a pale, scarred lioness lounging in a patch of sunlight shakes his hand with even more force than the gorilla. A much, much smaller man offers him a run-down of their vessel’s general mechanics while a stumpy beaver nods along at his side. A woman, tall and muscled with a rather delicate-looking red squirrel on her shoulder, stands behind the small man with a lot of smiles and rolling eyes.

Another woman, slight and speedy with a dark brown swift propelling around the hanger, conducts last-minute checks while offering safety tips. A young woman with an enormous polar bear looming just beyond her shoulder offers Hanzo a rations container that he would be unwise not to graciously accept.

It isn’t difficult, being polite. Hanzo spent most of his youth being polite to people he would rather see dead. Not that he wishes these people harm, but their general attitude—the desperate optimism of washed-up heroes—mixes poorly with his own state.

At least the dirigible they have provided seems sturdy enough: a sleek, almost shark-like ship with thick sides and a steel-gray balloon held aloft by rigid suspension. Hanzo circles around, inspecting its hull only to find McCree and Nisparilla waiting by the ramp; the man leaning on one hip, the hawk perched on his shoulder. McCree is wearing, if possibly, even more leather than before in the shape of an old gray duster. A large satchel waits by his feet, all the supply boxes long-since loaded.

He offers Hanzo a hand as the archer approaches, but Hanzo walks right past him and up the ramp. “Don’t dawdle.”

But any attempt to immediately take control of this ‘partnership’ deflates somewhat when McCree boards the dirigible and effortlessly starts up the ship. Hanzo attempts to watch him without making it obvious, but the man moves so quickly and assuredly, there is hardly any time to absorb one action before he is on to the next.

“Y’all take care now, y’here?” McCree says to the Overwatch crew as the dirigible hums to life. “Don’t go doin’ anything I wouldn’t do.”

Hanzo watches them shout and playfully jeer at McCree while McCree smirks and tips his hat. Nisparilla lets out a screaming cry as the ship lifts up, lurches forward, and then Hanzo has the barest second to look back at Genji’s steel mask before they’re accelerating out over the sea and up to the clouds.

The unknown knowledge of his little brother’s expression burns like a bad photogram in the back of Hanzo’s mind.

“Better rest up,” McCree half-shouts from the helm. “We’ll be in the air for awhile.”

Hanzo turns to look at McCree, back-lit by the Mediterranean sunset, and breathes out all his frustrations in one short, toxic huff.

_What are we doing here?_

__|¯|__

In the morning, the sun rises high above mountainous clouds and a righteous blue sky. The wind is strong, but not unmanageably so. Hanzo wakes with the taste of copper in his mouth and, looking at Hatsue and Tsuji, sees that they did not sleep well. If McCree were looking, he might assume the twins were ill.

Foreboding rushes through his chest like flooding water as he drapes his scarf over their coiled body before he starts his morning meditation.

McCree fries sausages and rips apart sourdough bread for their breakfast. He uses the bread to wipe up the pan’s salt and oil and eats it with gusto; Nisparilla tears at a dead rodent with similar vigor. Some kind of alcohol mists from McCree’s flask, but Hanzo doesn’t comment; he has a gourd full of sake and he’s not above joining McCree in a few morning shots with their coffee. He has a sneaking suspicion that he’ll need it.

By mid-morning, he’s proven right: McCree has a way of speaking that makes even the most serious breach of privacy seem like as light a thing as a tip of his hat. “So, what’s it like?”

Hanzo looks up from his leather notebook. McCree is just draped there, leaning back against a coil of rope with his stretched legs crossed at the ankles, only occasionally touching the wheel.

Hanzo knows perfectly well what McCree is referring to, but, as with Genji, he’s not about to do the work for him. He can manage politeness, but he doesn’t care at all about this man or his feelings.

McCree shifts. “Having dragons for daemons, I mean.”

 _Ah._ A little different from what Hanzo was expecting, but not by much. “It was a great honor,” Hanzo mutters, going back to his writing.

“That what your daddy taught you to say?”

Hanzo looks up again. McCree is lighting a cigar now. If he’d seemed at all smug, Hanzo would have thrown him over the side, but despite the rough candor of his word choice, McCree seems sincere. Likely he simply suffers from typical Texan indelicacy. And Hanzo has dealt with enough foreigners to know how terms like ‘honor’ can sometimes land.

That doesn’t mean he’s about to outline the concept for his sake. “It was...” Hanzo reaches for his own flask, the ouroboros dragons winking in the sun, and holds it to his lips with his eyes soldering McCree’s. “...A great honor.”

McCree looks down as Hanzo drinks. It’s surprising, seeing the gunslinger chastened, but—after reminding himself that he does not care—Hanzo returns to his writing.

After a moment, the gunslinger starts up again. “Me n’ Nisparilla were on the road before the call. Not nearly s’long as you, but, from what I hear, we took similar jobs.” Hanzo looks up again to see McCree smirk. “S’matter of fact, think I actually saw you, once.”

“Did you.”

“Beijing. Almost a year and… two months ago? Summer gala?” McCree must see Hanzo recognize the truth in that statement, because he presses on. “Was tracking down some pharmaceutical kingpin at the party. You were there. Recognized you from… well, from news photos I saw years before.”

It’s difficult to stomach all of what Genji must have told this man about Hanzo. Nevermind that McCree was there to witness the results of Hanzo’s doings first-hand. 

The wind picks up, taking the golden sash in Hanzo’s hair with it. Hatsue and Tsuji draw closer, crawling over his lap for warmth. “I see.”

“You remember bein’ there, then?”

“I remember the shrimp being spoiled.”

McCree chuckles. He turns his cigar in his fingers, looking at it like it’s something interesting. The cigar smoke rises high and thick, the scent toasty and dark—sense-memories of espresso and rum dance through Hanzo’s mind.

“I was one hundred percent sure you were there to jack my target. Put some mighty hustle in me, tell you what. But I don’t think you were there for him at all.”

“I was not.”

“Now that is surprising. Wasn’t like the paycheck weren’t nice.”

Hanzo shrugs. He tries to keep writing. But he feels McCree’s eyes on him, as well as Nisparilla’s—boring into him as pointedly as a sniper’s red dot. He has the wild fancy that, were they both flying a hundred feet above, they would still see through him as clearly and viciously as they do now. If they were on the other side of the world, they would pick out the dents in his ceramic flask.

When he finally looks at Nisparilla, he could swear he sees a flash of red across her eyes, like that of a reptile. 

He cannot deny the memory of his father’s dragon, whose name he hasn’t spoken in over ten years, bearing down on him from the training field. Massive, terrifying. Red.

Hanzo sighs. “Barnjak was a patsy. Killing him would have only opened a seat for another. I was sure that, if I went to the gala, I would uncover his puppet masters.” 

“I see,” McCree drawls. “Lookin’ out for the greater good.”

Hanzo snorts. “Their pay would undoubtedly be twice as high as Barnjak’s.”

“Uh-huh.”

Hanzo lets the pause hang while he considers whether his next question is the right move. “I heard some days later that Barnjak went missing. Not jailed. He simply disappeared.” He smirks when McCree catches his eye. “Just whose check did you accept for your work?”

“Sorry, darlin’,” McCree grins toothily around his cigar while Hanzo bristles all over, “That there’s client privilege.”

“Do not call me that.”

“What? ‘Darlin’?’”

“You insult me.”

“Naw, ain’t like that. I’m not tryin’a... it’s just how I talk. Ain’t a judgment on your capability or nothin.’”

The gunslinger seems genuine, but Hanzo narrows his eyes at him anyway. McCree’s smile goes crooked. “Honest.”

“You may be used to a certain level of…” Hanzo looks McCree’s entire body up and down, finds McCree’s smile a little smaller when he re-meets his eyes, “Coarseness, with your fellow agents. But I am accustomed to a different etiquette.”

McCree tips his cigar over the side and then, to Hanzo’s equal surprise and disgust, speaks in the most horrendously accented Japanese, “Don’t worry, Shimada-san. I’ve spent time with yakuza. I’ll be nice,” only he uses a colloquial term for nice that means something more like “sweet” or “docile,” and Hanzo can only stare daggers while McCree turns back towards the horizon, chuckling, puffing on his cigar.

Hanzo angrily scans that canine grin, then lets his eyes be drawn down the jutting tendon in the gunslinger’s throat, down to the two buttons undone beneath his collarbone, at the hint of dark chest hair and swollen pectoral muscles; then back up, slowly, to the way his soft brown hair curls around his ear in the wind; the little notches in the cartilage, scars and close-calls.

Then Hanzo looks at Nisparilla, sees her watching him, and turns back to his notebook. Hatsue lets out something like a low, hissing sigh, which Tsuji echoes. 

No one speaks again until sunset, when McCree asks Hanzo if he prefers more sausages or ham for his dinner. Hanzo chooses ham and the quietude resumes. It’s not often he meets anyone with both the air of a loquacious conman and the ability to slip into a comfortable silence at will. 

The ham is good: sautéed with syrupy pineapples, a treat McCree brandishes with great pride from a can at the bottom of their sparse supply crate. He mentions having taken it from one of the Andean islands, hinting at a greater tale but restraining himself just enough to provoke curiosity.

All day long, Hanzo has found it difficult not to watch McCree; the man himself is action-oriented, always making adjustments, seeing to this or that, scanning every patch of skyline. That they may be followed was not implied in their debriefing, but Hanzo is sure that Winston also held a separate briefing for McCree. The cowboy certainly knows more than he lets on.

Besides that, he is nice to look at, and spending an entire day in a dirigible allows for few quality distractions. Hanzo thinks he catches McCree looking at him, too; he glanced at the man no less than three times during his work-out only to see McCree quickly turn away each and every time. Once, McCree even picked up the frying pan right after, then visibly struggled to decide what to do with it. He wound up wiping it down with a cloth, which was wholly unnecessary, while Hanzo resumed his pull-ups with a huge smirk pulling at facial muscles long-since forgotten.

But still, he feels uneasy; saddled with a partner he knows next to nothing about, on their way to dangers unknown. One who not only carries an active aura of danger, but seems to encourage it with every inch of his body.

“Where did you learn to operate a dirigible?"

The question falls out of nowhere, and McCree looks at Hanzo with appropriate surprise, but Hanzo has been churning over methods of unearthing more information from this man since they finished dinner, and that was more than a few hours ago.

“Learned all kinda things in the Watch.” McCree licks his fingers, having just finished a bar of chocolatl from the girl with the polar bear’s package. “Like riding a bicycle.”

“You mean Blackwatch,” Hanzo mutters. “Where you worked with Genji.”

“That’s the one.”

“What else did you learn?”

McCree, despite the initial appraising look he gives Hanzo, leans back with his first mug of whiskey and speaks as freely as if he were on his fifth. He describes the skills he learned as a child gangster in Texas’s tumultuous southwest region, as well as the skills he picked up after he was arrested and given a “serve or prison” ultimatum by the enigmatic commander of Overwatch’s black ops division, Gabriel Reyes. When gently pressed, he tells Hanzo about Reyes’ deep yet complicated relationship with Jack Morrison, the firm yet inspiring leader of all of Overwatch. He speaks as if Hanzo is a reporter and McCree the subject, but without such a level of rehearsal that Hanzo suspects a lie. He also interjects jokes and maintains a wry self-awareness that should not be as charming as it is.

Of course, Hanzo expects a Blackwatch agent—and the former second-in-command, no less—to be a practiced liar. If McCree had been at all reticent, he would have understood, but for all their talk of ‘teamwork’ and ‘turning over a new leaf,’ Overwatch would be hypocritical for denying Hanzo the same courtesy of information as the rest.

That is, until Hanzo tries to ask about the infamous Ana Amari, Overwatch’s third founding member and one of the greatest snipers the world has ever known.

McCree suddenly looks much more interested in his whiskey. “That there’s classified.”

Hanzo frowns. “I am already aware of her career and that she was killed in the line of duty. What more could possibly demand the veil of classification?”

“Some things a man just don’t get into,” McCree mutters into his mug. 

“Doesn’t get into, or doesn’t get into with me?”

McCree looks up with a crooked, knowing grin. “You tryn’a suss out whether or not I’d be concealin’ information on account of your background?”

Hanzo braces for impact. “Yes.”

“Well, I ain’t. And I won’t. I’ll tell you straight—anything I know about Overwatch, Blackwatch, or the shit we’re gettin’ into now? You know as much as I know. I won’t get into Ana on principle, not with you or anyone. 

But,” he sits up now, leans forward with his elbows on his knees, faces Hanzo squarely, “If you’re wonderin’, more specifically, if you’re under any kinda trial period, I’ll tell you that straight, too. You sure as hell are. Not with Winston, not with Overwatch officially, but unofficially? With me?” McCree turns his jaw to look at Hanzo a little more sideways, almost smirking, pointing his right eye at him like it’s a lens he can see better through, “I think you and I both know I’d be foolish not to wait n’ see if you’re worth trustin’ or not.”

Hanzo feels the impulse to cup that jaw and to throw his first into it at the same time.

It’s a moment before he can shake his mind free and reply. “Perhaps.”

“You know you’d do the same,” McCree drawls, leaning back again. “How long did it take for you to trust fresh blood in the clan?”

“We never took fresh blood,” Hanzo replies, looking down into his own gourd-shaped flask.

“Thought as much.” McCree taps his metal fingers on the side of his mug. The skull emblazoned into the side of his prosthetic forearm is crude and evocative of the man’s early days in a motorcycle gang, but he did mention, in his lengthy story, having lost it well after starting his Blackwatch career.

Curious.

“Hey now,” McCree points up.

Hanzo’s eyes widen on the wisping clouds as they scatter away to reveal a bounty of stars, clear and brilliant and so close-by. The air is thin and cold as he sucks in a deep breath, letting a shiver wrack his body that feels needed, important. Like the steeling breath he took before entering the med bay at Overwatch, knowing Genji was inside. His breath leaves him slowly as he traces the miasma of light and dark clouding that is their own galaxy, along with all of the other things he will never know.

When he looks back down, he catches McCree looking at him again. This time, the gunslinger offers a small smile, one that Hanzo cannot bring himself to return, though he doesn’t look away first.

When McCree does turn, he does so towards Nisparilla, who’s gliding alongside the ship some hundred yards away. His face looks forlorn, distant; more like the cowboys Hanzo only knows through books and photograms.

He makes a mental note to ask McCree just how he is able to be so far away from his daemon.

“Well, now that I’ve spilled most of my guts,” McCree lifts his mug to Hanzo, “How’s about you regale me with scintillating tales of the far East?” He lifts the mug to his lips, which have curved into what Hanzo would call a gambler’s smirk. “That is, if you’d care to return the favor.”

Knowing that his sense of duty is being baited, Hanzo speaks anyway. He doesn’t lie, but he does withhold, and makes it clear when he is doing so. If McCree notices, he doesn’t comment.

When he has finished, McCree has the sort of expression on his face that Hanzo might once have called sympathetic. Now he just calls it distasteful.

And McCree doesn't truly respond—not in any notable way. The only notable thing he does after Hanzo has spoken for more than an hour happens right after he stands, stretches up with both arms, and requests that Hanzo get some shut-eye before McCree grows too sleepy to keep watch.

As Hanzo smooths out his cot, he hears: "they're real pretty, y'know that?"

He looks over his shoulder up at the cowboy, who is just standing there with his hands on his hips. "What?"

"Them two." McCree nods towards Hatsue and Tsuji, who are already slinking onto Hanzo's cot.

Hanzo is speechless. Tsuji usually keeps his head hidden beneath Hanzo's scarf because the sight of them is enough to induce disgust in most people, panic in others. Snakes alone are not the most honorable of daemons; that his own are a sort of monster has been an open wound in Hanzo's heart for years.

"Thank you," Hanzo mutters, reverting to politeness to carry him through his tidal waves of feeling. "Your hawk, she is—"

"They're kinda iridescent, huh?"

Hanzo scoffs, begins to object, but when he turns to his daemons, his breath stops. They are, indeed, iridescent; a rainbow of hues shine from their scales as Hanzo turns his head this way and that to test the angle of illumination. How could he not have noticed that before?

There is no way. It must be something new.

Hanzo whips his head around to glare at McCree, perhaps accuse him of something, but the gunslinger is already back at the helm, turned away from Hanzo and the twins.

He elects to bite his tongue. Hatsue and Tsuji have been growing steadily since their transformation. Perhaps the iridescence is just a marker of age, like Hanzo's graying sideburns. Perhaps, when next they shed their skin, they will be different.

When he lays down, Hanzo opens his cloak to let Hatsue and Tsuji slither inside; the night has only grown colder.

“What are we doing here, Hanzo?” Hatsue’s tongue flicks out and in, a gentle wrinkle in her reptilian mouth; as if she tasted something bitter. “You know there is nothing that can be accomplished with these people.”

Hanzo sighs through his nostrils, head resting back on his hands, facing the stars. He whispers back, “Perhaps this trial will provide benefits I cannot yet foresee.”

“He wants us to change back,” Tsuji drones. “He is ashamed of us.”

The switch in Hanzo’s tone startles even him. “I am not ashamed of you.” His dragon used to be more like a distant, intimidating relative to him than like his own soul; she knew him inside and out, but rarely did they share a moment of true, secure intimacy. Hanzo was always trying to impress her, to live up to her power. Now—now it’s like talking to that same relative when they are old and scared and as helpless as a child.

“I am merely concerned. Wild snakes in this form do not often live for very long—”

“We are not snakes,” Hatsue hisses.

Hanzo swallows his next sigh. There’s never any arguing with them, just like with children. And it’s always two against one.

It’s not like he can claim to be of one mind, either.

“Get some rest. There is much to do tomorrow.”

Eventually, all three of them coil up tightly and have separate, fitful dreams that not even McCree’s snoring can interrupt.

And far below the dirigible, beneath the cover of cloud, a black swan glides in their wake.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this one, let me know! If you didn't like it, please DM me at [@deslamoto](https://twitter.com/DesLaMoto) lol


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